Museum Monday 2026/33

 

detail of a sixteenth-century Italian majolica gourd flask with stopper, now at the Legion of Honor

Friday Photo 2026/33

 

building detail near the Phoenix Theater, San Francisco

West Edge Opera: The Turn of the Screw

The West Edge Opera Festival is in full swing; as I did last year, I will be seeing each show twice, as I volunteer at the Saturday matinees & am a ticket holder for the Sunday matinees. I have now seen my two performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, based on the famous ghost story by Henry James as adapted by librettist Myfanwy Piper. Company music director Jonathan Khuner led a strong performance, with committed, exciting singing from the cast: Laura Bohn as the Governess, Alex Boyer as Peter Quint, Erin Neff as Mrs Grose, Aléxa Sessler as Miss Jessel; James Coniglio & Noah Hajduk alternate as Miles, & Siena Coniglio & Roya Agarwal as Flora (I saw both sets of children). Company head Mark Streshinsky directed a provocative but sometimes puzzling staging.

Plentiful use is made of projections & scrims. I know some people who are immediately put off by scrims on stage, but I am fine with them, especially for a work like this, in which they act as a physical representation of the haziness, the out-spreading ambiguities, of the story & the layers of memory & interpretation or misinterpretation through which that story unfolds. They also provide a useful screen for the plentiful projections, through which this production tells much of its tale; the ghosts, for example, are always projections, never appearing physically on stage until they take their bows. Those singers are sequestered in a discreet curtained booth way up in the auditorium & off to the side; I probably would not have noticed it but someone pointed it out to me & told me what it was. (There is enough weirdness in the Scottish Rite Temple so that this particular oddity didn't stand out.) The physical dislocation between the projected figures on stage & the sound of their voices helps create an otherworldly air about them (this is true also of the amplification of the children's singing, which lends, as amplification usually does, an odd, slightly flattened effect to their voices).

Some of what is shown on film, though, falls under the "puzzling" category I mentioned earlier. When the Governess meets the handsome, romantic guardian of the two children, with his somewhat odd injunction that whatever happens, she, a young & inexperienced woman, must deal with it on her own, without contacting him, the two of them are shown on the scrims in passionate physical embraces. The Governess looks disheveled & a bit distraught. This seems to be something that we are meant to understand is actually happening & not just a (literal as well as metaphorical) projection of the Governess's fantasies about this mysterious figure (he is literally masked, wearing a carnival black mask, which presumably also is meant to differentiate him from Peter Quint, as the same singer performs both roles). When I see moments like this, which I do fairly often in contemporary stagings of works from different, less accommodating times, I wonder if anyone these days knows what "sexual repression" really means. It doesn't mean being a bit discombobulated by a brief & unsatisfying affair; it means that even the notion of such a thing, when it inevitably starts creeping into the susceptible mind, is hurried out of sight, pushed down out of conscious thought, into the murky depths of longing that act as the hidden springs of our outward actions. This story is one that springs in that way from repression. I don't understand what is gained by making the Governess's barely acknowledged desires, or even just her romantic feelings towards the guardian, into actual physical embraces. It seems too crudely obvious.

We are also shown several times footage of Miles at school. He is cowering near a sink, obviously in a bathroom, being pelted by unseen but presumably fellow-student hands with wadded balls of paper. Miles has, of course, been expelled from school, for reasons that are never officially explained. In classic horror-story style, this allows our imaginations to float free, though they mostly head in the direction of some sort of sexual corruption. The footage here, as with that of the Governess & the guardian, is too explicit & also too trivial: this is the sort of thing that gets the perpetrators a stern talking-to, not expulsion. Spelling things out kills the mystery & the haunted atmosphere. Also, it looks as if Miles is the victim, so why would he be expelled? I am assuming the boy we are shown is meant to be Miles; we are not shown his face, which he clutches in his hands, because of course we have two separate Miles (Mileses?) performing. It's not impossible that the unseen Miles is meant to be leading the victimization of another boy, but, again, what happens doesn't seem to warrant expulsion. The scene, whether Miles is victim (as I think he's meant to be) or perp, goes against everything we are told about him: that he is a boy who is very popular with other children & adored by adults. And if he were being bullied & ostracized in school, why would he be so eager to go back?

There are also many projections of the still-living Quint & Jessel in their time with the children. These are literally sunny & quite wholesome: Quint playing catch with Miles (using an American baseball glove, rather surprisingly), sitting with the children in church, teaching them to play the piano, gently touching the swollen middle of an apparently pregnant Miss Jessel. In many of these scenes, Quint is wearing a light tan sweater vest. No man can look insidious, corrupt & corrupting, in a sweater vest. This is simply a fact. I may not know much about fashion, but I know that.

During my second viewing of the production, it occurred to me that perhaps this was a deliberate move, a signal to us: Quint & Jessel are actually not, & were not while living, corrupting influences; they were, instead, positive role models of a healthy sexuality. I think what we have here are essentially two separate sets of ghosts: the wholesome ones &, later on, dressed in serving-man attire & more luridly lit, the evil influences of the Governess's fevered imagination.

I had to parse this out after seeing the show twice & reading the director's note in the program & thinking between my two performances about the implications of what we are shown. Some elements I haven't mentioned yet went into this, so I'll spell them out now. The Governess (who throughout wears a sort of odd ensemble of plaid skirt & white blouse, like an overaged Catholic schoolgirl back when such girls wore school uniforms) is disturbed by her encounter with the guardian. When she arrives at the lush estate of Bly, the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, who is apparently intended as a sort of Mrs Danvers figure, kisses her ("with your permission") full on the lips. This triggers the already emotionally vulnerable Governess, who picks up on Mrs Grose intense disgust at the former & now dead valet, Quint, & his relations with the former governess Miss Jessel. The Governess then projects her sense of sexual danger & corruption onto these two, hallucinating their appearance as ghosts who are still capable of corrupting Miles & Flora; in the later scenes, when this more threatening Quint appears, we see the Governess off to the side, mirroring his actions in a herky-jerky way (but which is the marionette & which the puppet master?). The Governess determines to protect the children, with increasing hysteria (yes, I know the origin of the word) & dire results.

At least, I think that's what we're supposed to see here. Questions are raised & there are no definite answers, which I suppose is only suitable for a work rooted in a story by Henry James.

I re-read the tale before going to the opera. It is, as any English major can tell you, a celebrated example of the potential ambiguities of a first-person narration: are the ghosts real, or are they a projection of a lonely, repressed young woman? (No other adult actually sees them, & we only have the Governess's word for it that the children do.) It occurred to me this time that there is a third way: the ghosts are indeed a corrupting influence, but what the Governess sees as the corruption of the Innocent is what Blake would have termed Innocence turning into Experience (in this light, Quint's longing appeal to Miles, comparing himself to a wild horse on the shore, is particularly telling). In other words, given what is usually read as the sexual nature of the ghosts' influence, the Governess is trying to keep them artificially innocent, out of adulthood, confined forever in the stylized innocence of the children's folk rhymes that form an important part of the score. The Governess actually succeeds in her aim, but with tragic results. This move from innocence into an adult consciousness expanded by the knowledge of how vicious people can be is certainly one of James's great themes; The Ambassadors & The Golden Bowl & The Wings of the Dove, that massive trio from late in his career, explore this theme with ever-expanding subtlety. How can the good not only remain good but become better exactly through confronting the evils of others?

The idea of Mrs Grose as a repressed lesbian is definitely not in James, but that's OK. It struck me as an intriguing possibility. In the novel, Mrs Grose, as her name indicates, is a sort of salt-of-the-earth, good-hearted but not particularly imaginative woman ("gross" in the sense of solid & not refined, not in the sense of "ooh, icky!"). She functions as the "normal" person who is mostly willing to go along with an educated young woman like the Governess. Interpreting her as a further turn of the Governess's screw ratchets up the general sense of perversity, which certainly works for this opera, but it also removes any sense of a "normal" world, outside of what we see of the living Quint & Jessel.

When I saw this production the first time, I felt the kiss came out of the blue & went nowhere. I did notice in my second viewing that there is a scene when Mrs Grose tentatively & briefly strokes the Governess's hair, but that still isn't a lot. The key mechanism here – the transference of Mrs Grose's obsessions to the Governess – did not occur to me until I read the director's note ("When the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, who has her own problems of obsession, expresses to the highly suggestible Governess her deep-seated anger toward the memory of the late valet, Peter Quint, we are launched into a perfect storm of psychosis."). I'm pretty sure I would not have picked this up from staging alone. I'm not wild about the Hitchcockian notion of the insidious lesbian, but I can see the possibilities here. (But if it's Mrs Grose's lesbian attraction that rouses the Governess, why is the latter so fixated on Miles & not on Flora?)

Perhaps we are meant to understand the source of the problem not as Mrs Grose's sexuality, but her repression. But "repression" doesn't really come across here. It's inherent in the original material, just because of when it's set. And it is very unclear when this production is meant to take place. I asked a number of people what they thought, & pick a decade from 1890 to the present day & someone suggested it, but no two people listed the same one. I think this matters because ideas of sexual corruption & therefore what should be repressed & therefore whether repression is "good" or "bad" have varied wildly over those years. Miss Jessel's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, as shown here, would be a life-destroying tragedy in one decade & a lovely occasion for a congratulatory party in another. There is no single standard. One thing that has not changed is horror at pedophilia, but honestly I never felt in this production that the ghosts posed any kind of sexual threat to the children; as I said, they seemed to be the only healthy role models they had. (I should mention that some people at the same performance disagreed with me about this.)

There are occasional hints of sexual confusion, or perhaps just gender play: when the children are introduced to the Governess, Flora bows & Miles gives a dainty curtsy, but this seems more like mischievous fun than any sort of "corruption". The libretto uses words that would have carried a subtextual weight when the opera premiered in 1954, a subtext which now comes across more as text: gay, which is used to describe the guardian (making his making-out with the Governess either more or less effective, depending on your point of view) & queer. What do those words mean in the context of whenever this production is set?

The lack of an identifiable time period also reduces the way class differences play out among the characters; again, in some decades the class distinctions are vital & in others not so much. One reason Mrs Grose defers to the Governess is the latter's higher class, & one reason she disapproves of Quint is that he aimed above his station: she asserts that Miss Jessel was a lady & therefore too good for him, but this sort of proto-D H Lawrence theme doesn't really come through here.

The Turn of the Screw is inherently a work (whether original tale or operatic adaptation) of radiating ambiguities. There were several points when I felt this production offered not ambiguity but confusion. I have seen the opera before, heard recordings, read the original story & other works by Henry James (not just in college but recently), read the program notes, & saw the West Edge production twice, & it was still sometimes unclear to me what we were supposed to be seeing, And I wonder how many others will see the opera twice, or have the other background I have just listed. I will speculate that this is a case in which the artists involved were so immersed in the material that what was crystalline to them is murky to those less immersed. But I'm not sure the oddities & confusions are altogether a bad thing. I have pondered this production far more thoroughly than I have more superficially pleasing shows; it led me down previously unexplored paths I would have otherwise missed.

When I started telling myself something in the staging was "wrong" I started wondering why I found it so, exploring different implications & suggestions, & I (mostly) ended up thinking that what I saw was not "wrong" so much as an alternative that I needed to consider. If some things don't quite fit in, & some things seem too obvious & others too vague, if  some confusion & uncertainty remain, that's not really unsuitable to a story like this. This is after all a ghost story, & wondering where the solid ground is & what just happened seem like the essence of a haunting.

Museum Monday 2026/32

 

detail of an untitled study by Diego Rivera for Allegory of California, a ceiling mural for the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2026/32

 

a street in Oakland, California

Museum Monday 2026/31

 

detail of Interlock by Maren Hassinger, seen at BAM/PFA as part of the special exhibit Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing

@ Z Space: In a Memory Palace

Last night at Z Space I saw the first performance of In a Memory Palace, a resonant & mesmerizing new work. Done in the style of Noh Theater, it is the story of a middle-aged woman who visits her father in a senior residence only to encounter a strange & strangely familiar old woman, who reminds her of a childhood neighbor, a refugee from Hitler's Austria, a woman she was sure had died long before. Though this work has a very specific storyline, it is evocative of other journeys, both chosen & forced, both physical & mental; the evocation is not only on the stage, but in the lobby, which contains an installation exploring different aspects of exile & emigration. Moving away from some "native land" or from your family traditions is such a basic American story that it would be difficult to find, I think, someone who didn't connect with this material on some level, perhaps even a profound one.

(I give away some plot twists below, so take that into consideration when deciding whether to read on, though most of them are fairly easily guessed if you've seen any Noh plays.)

This work floats suspended in a liminal space: between Japanese & Western theatrical techniques & traditions; between the flute & percussion of Noh & the Western sounds of cello & piano evoking fin de siècle Vienna; between present & past; among the actual, the remembered, the supernatural, & the desired. The stage is bare; there are actually two stages, a broad main one, bright white, & then, on its left, a smaller one, the same bright white, that functions as the entry/exit ramp as in Noh Theater (but it also, in being slightly set apart & narrower than the main stage, though otherwise resembling it, reinforces the subtle disjunctions that are part of the mood & metaphors of the piece). At the back of the playing area are several very long overlapping translucent white curtains (sort of like shower curtains); onto these are projected monochrome designs, some of them ambiguous (waves? rocks? massed foliage? as well as stars or stylish Viennese designs). To the right, off from the main stage, sits a chorus of eight, who sometimes chant comments on the action.

As in Noh, the action is very deliberate, very considered. The dialogue is mostly chanted to musical accompaniment & is poetic in its repetitions & phrasings. At times I could not catch every line, which is just a reality of listening to material that is sung with musical accompaniment. I briefly wished that they had used surtitles, but decided that would have been too distracting, at least for a compulsive reader like me. As with comments written in the margin of a book, the printed words would pull you out of your own total experience of the material & impose concentration on only certain aspects of what's going on. The imperfection of our perception is actually a key theme of the work, the blurring of words & memories, the half-caught phrases & the passing glimpses of life. Surtitles would force on the work an almost counter-effective clarity. This is not to discount the power & beauty of the words, but just to suggest that's what most important here is not catching each individual line (most of which are clear enough, as is the storyline) but immersing yourself in the mood, one created by slowness, the intense presence of the characters, the spare but rich setting, the mystery of memory, & of the past, our own & the world's.

For it turns out there are several mysteries around the older woman. The woman who remembered her from childhood (she's wrapped in a shawl, sort of babushka style, printed with an abstract monochrome design but with a very bright red fringe; the performer sits to the side for most of the performance with an intense, riveting, attentive quiet) remembered her as saying she was a concert pianist. This elderly woman claims she was a well-known fashion designer to the Viennese haute monde. She was a Catholic married to a Jew; after the Anschluss, such women were "encouraged" to leave their husbands but she refused & they managed to emigrate but of course abandoning their homes & homeland threw their lives off-course & the glamor & excitement of her fashionable, sophisticated Viennese world vanished with that world.

Perhaps this is why the woman's spirit is haunting the earth, to make her story known, or just to revisit herself the life she should have had. Ghosts are a traditional presence in Noh. The character of the old woman is the only one in this play to be masked in the traditional style. But her costumes are Western: a series of strikingly sumptuous gowns in the style & colors (lots of Klimt-like swirls & gold) of the Vienna Secessionists. She ends the work with a solo dance, summoning both the traditions of Japanese theater & the vanished waltzes of Vienna.

The play is brief (about one hour & fifteen minutes) but intense & concentrated, the sort of thing that will flower out in your mind afterward. It is playing at Z Space through 1 August & then goes to San Antonio, Texas. The play has a dedicated website, which you can find here. I will say that the playbill was not entirely clear about who did what & if there was a cast list I couldn't find it. So here's what I found (much of this comes from J Magazine, which had an article about the show; there were copies available in the theater lobby): the script is by Edith Newton, based on elements from her life; the music by David Crandall & Kevin Salfen, costumes by Margaret Mitchell, masks by Kitazawa Hideta, direction by Jubilith Moore. The show was presented by Theatre Nohgaku with Kunoichi Productions & Theatre of Yugen. Kudos to all of them & to the actors & musicians on a magnificent evening.

Friday Photo 2026/31

 

detail of tile work at Francisco Middle School, San Francisco

Elektra Redux

The morning of the last performance of San Francisco Opera's Elektra, which was also the last performance of the season, I was lucky enough to receive a text from a friend offering me the additional ticket she had for the evening, as her expected guest had unexpectedly had to drop out. I say I was lucky, but it took a moment for the luck to sink in. I had been out late the night before, & I sleep poorly anyway, waking up feeling more tired than when I went to bed, & a sudden change of plan can throw me. I tend to respond quickly, & my first impulse was to decline, but wiser heads (well, mine) prevailed & I told myself to ponder this offer for at least 10 minutes before responding. It didn't even take that long. My brain adjusted & my fingers typed out the response that should have been immediate as well as obvious: yes, thank you!

This revival was something to see as often as possible, just as the original 2017 production was. Both times the powerhouse cast made the run a must-see (or rather, a must-hear). But there was another selling point: the production itself, by Keith Warner. Set in a museum display of Bronze Age Greece, it provided an evocative, rich, & exciting concept. Partly, as I said in my post on this year's revival (which is here), there's just a sense of gratitude that someone did something with this piece besides throwing the cast in vaguely Grecian tunics amid a few shattered columns. But there's more to it than that; I've seen other productions of this work that took some chances (I recall one with huge sides of raw slaughtered beef hanging up around the stage). And productions that do more than sketch in the basics are not always popular. There is definitely a large section of the opera audience that resists anything that indicates an "attitude" towards the work: updating, deconstructing, rethinking, whatever. I put "attitude" in quotation marks because of course there's always an attitude of some sort being displayed; staging is inherently interpretation.

Opera audiences are usually quick, too quick in my frequently expressed opinion, to sneer at any production that tries anything different. Yet this production, so provocative, so very much a "concept", not only seems to have escaped the usual jibes: it seems to be, as far as I can tell, that rare thing, a production that is actually beloved, even apart from the musical execution.

I think what a lot of people object to in most "concept" productions is the misalignment between what the production is imposing on the work & what people go to the opera for: many people attend to get swept up in grand emotions, transported to a different time & place, an alternate level of reality. Most "concept" productions drily deconstruct the usual operatic narratives & tropes, offering an intellectual review of the grand passions, an overlay of present-day preoccupations on the escapist fantasy many in the audience are hoping for. (Neither side is really right or wrong; the audience's assumptions about classic works can be as wrong-headed as an inappropriate interpretation.) In other words, the audience feels condescended to by the "concept": oh, you want sweeping romance? Cute! Here's a presentation that will dismiss what you want in favor of shoving the sour world as we see it back in your face.  It's intellect versus emotion. Perhaps that is why there is so much anger directed at productions of this type; fortunately the irritating dismissal of all such productions as "Eurotrash" seems to be going out of fashion, at least in my hearing, but the anger remains. These productions can be good, or bad; but usually a lot of the audience dismisses them automatically based on the concept, not on its execution.

What I'm guessing is that the Warner production manages to hit the sweet spot between offering a thoughtful critique of what is going on in the old myths / operas & how they resonate for contemporary audiences & sheer horror-film effectiveness. In other words, the production respects the material & the way its creators intended it to be presented, yet also offers us a fruitful alternative view of what's going on.

The thrills were undeniable. At this final performance, I was surprised when the killing of Klytemnestra, her severed head held aloft by her son & killer Orest, was met not only with audible gasps, as at most performances, but a fairly sizable round of applause. It seemed a bit bloodthirsty. (Maybe people didn't know her backstory? Her actions didn't come out of nowhere. Either way, it's a tribute to the intensity of the performances & the production.) A friend asked me later if there was a special energy to this, the final performance of the run & of the season, & maybe there was a bit of going-for-broke but as far as I could see, & as far as I heard, all the performances were pretty much all-out. One difference that signaled the end of the season: at the curtain call, one of the violinists (I assume she was retiring, or at least moving on) was called up on stage by conductor Eun Sun Kim to take a solo bow. She was showered with bouquets from the pit, which was lovely to see.

So Elektra provided a suitable capstone to a generally thrilling San Francisco Opera season. There's often a certain poignancy to wandering through the lobby for one last time as the attendees for the final performance trickle out (until we all start trickling back in for the next season, in a couple of months) but this time we were all on an Elektra rush. As we left the Opera House, the surrounding area was even more chaotic than usual, as Civic Center was already filling up with Pride Weekend partiers, & the train ride back to the East Bay was a Boschian hellscape. But it was still worth it to experience this Elektra one more time. I almost said one last time, but here's hoping this production, which I think we can call classic as well as beloved, comes around again before another ten years have passed.

Museum Monday 2026/30

 

detail of Sleeping Venus by Eustache Le Sueur, now at the Legion of Honor